In this file photo Pasquale Pepe, of Shelton, left, greets Jeff Wiggins at the showing of "The Fields of Margraten: Bitter Harvest." Pepe fought in one of the battles near Margraten that led to Jefferson's Army company digging the largest grave for U.S. forces in World War II. The film was shown as the closing selection of the Connecticut Film Festival at The Palace Theatre in Danbury, Sunday, April 10, 2011.
Photo: Michael Duffy, ST

In this file photo Pasquale Pepe, of Shelton, left, greets Jeff Wiggins at the showing of "The Fields of Margraten: Bitter Harvest." Pepe fought in one of the battles near Margraten that led to Jefferson's Army company digging the largest grave for U.S. forces in World War II. The film was shown as the closing selection of the Connecticut Film Festival at The Palace Theatre in Danbury, Sunday, April 10, 2011.
Photo: Michael Duffy, ST

NEW FAIRFIELD -- Jefferson Wiggins, an Alabama sharecropper's son who escaped from rural poverty to become a beloved teacher, mentor and proponent of a community's strength growing through its diversity, died Wednesday at the age of 87.

Wiggins, who was born in 1925, grew up at a time when the Ku Klux Klan still held sway over the South.

Once, he said, about 30 riders came to his house, threatening to kill his father. The crime: trying to sell a bale of cotton belonging to the farm's owner to get money to feed his hungry family. The family escaped to the next county in a horse and wagon.

Semi-literate at the time, Wiggins lied about his age as a teenager to join the segregated U.S. Army.

A librarian on Staten Island, Anna Marie Merrill, taught him to read. In lectures later in his life, Wiggins said he considered Merrill an angel on earth.

"He used to talk about walking into a library for the first time and realizing he could walk into a place with all these books without getting into trouble," his friend and neighbor Jody Gemmell said.

Gen. George S. Patton promoted Wiggins to first lieutenant during World War II, making him one of the few black officers in the U.S. Army.

At war's end, Wiggins said he and other black Army soldiers were assigned to bury the bodies of thousands of American soldiers at Margraten in the Netherlands.

An hourlong Dutch documentary about those days, "The Fields of Margraten," was shown at the Connecticut Film Festival in Danbury in 2011. Wiggins, who was interviewed on camera for the documentary, spoke at length after the film's showing.

"Any one of the segments of his life would have made a movie script," Hodge said. "Put them together and you wouldn't believe it."

After the war, Wiggins studied political science at Tennessee State University, and taught in Alabama and New Jersey. He met his wife, Janice, while he was teaching an honors seminar at Upsala College in New Jersey and she was one of his students.

His first book, "White Cross, Black Crucifixion," told of his work in the 1960s as a director of community programs in New Jersey.

The Wiggins family moved to New Fairfield in 1996 where he was a teacher, mentor, writer and was one of the most eloquent speakers in the area on the need for different races and religions to draw strength from each other.

"What I learned from him, more than anything else, was the importance of listening to people even if you disagreed with them," state Sen. Michael McLachlan, R-Danbury, said.

"He had a lot of insight about spreading peace in the world," Danbury Mayor Mark Boughton said.

Alicia Roy, the town's superintendent of schools, said Wiggins was one of the board members who hired her as principal of New Fairfield High School in 2001. When he talked to students at the school, Roy said, they were spellbound by his story.

"I don't think I've ever met anyone like him," said Barry Finch, of Ridgefield, who helped found the institute. "First of all, he was brilliant. But he also had more integrity that any man I've met."

Finch said, Wiggins was a man of deep compassion and empathy.

"I've never met anyone like him for building bridges anywhere there was a need for bridges to be built," Finch said.

In his later years, Wiggins received multiple awards for his work. To honor him, then-Gov. M. Jodi Rell, in 2005, held a Jefferson Wiggins Day in Connecticut.

In 2009, as the guest of the Dutch government, Wiggins, then 84 and the last surviving soldier to bury the dead at Margraten, delivered the keynote address at the 65th anniversary celebration of the liberation of the Netherlands by Allied forces during World War II.

Wiggins had repressed his memories of the war and Margraten, Janice Wiggins said. Reliving them proved hard.

"He had to deliver a speech. Ordinarily, it took him a day to write a speech," she said. "This one took him forever."

Gemmell accompanied the couple to the Netherlands. There, she said, Wiggins was asked over and over to recount his war years.

"Children came up to him to give him flowers," Gemmell said. "It was one of the most humbling experiences I've ever seen."

As draining it was to tell those stories, Janice Wiggins said her husband did not shy away.

"He was the last man left from his company," she said. "He felt it was his responsibility.